


The Herald and the Wolves

by thewitch0fthewilds (gossamerstarsxx)



Series: Not With Haste [5]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Awkward Cullen, Blood and Injury, Cullen Is Sort Of A Damsel, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Inquisitor Being an Asshole, Lyrium Withdrawal, Minor Injuries, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-15 01:10:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9212783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gossamerstarsxx/pseuds/thewitch0fthewilds
Summary: The demons that escaped from the Breach have begun influencing Haven's wildlife. Cullen is caught unprepared.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** : Not beta-read; animal death; animal injury.

"Don't move, shem."

She whispers so softly that Cullen can scarcely hear her, but he does as he's told, freezing with his back to hers as they stare down the pack surrounding them.

The wolves are great black beasts, with fierce green eyes and slavering jowls and long yellow teeth that would likely only be deflected by plate. Their snouts are wrinkled back. The whole group has their hackles raised and they snarl softly, daring either the Herald or Cullen to make a move.

His left shoulder is deep, sickening pain, each puncture wound an epicenter of agony, and the blood will not stop flowing. The Herald's scarf has done little to stanch it. It seeps up through the soft cloth, gathers in beads on his skin and runs in sticky-warm rivulets down his arm, and he smells it, like a purse of old coppers; he has a brief moment of bitter amusement when he realizes he can no longer smell lyrium in his blood.

He wonders what lyrium would do to wolves; on the heels of that, he realizes that he is in trouble. He is losing blood and has been out in the sleet-wet cold for over an hour now. One or the other might not be so bad, but the two of them together?

"Shem," she hisses, still nearly too quiet for Cullen to hear. "Stay still. Do not move, no matter what happens - if they do not all follow me, curl up and play dead."

"What - ?"

"Shut up," she mutters, "And do as I say!"

Cullen does as he's told, but he is not prepared for what she does next.

She slips from his back like his shadow at noon, daggers at the ready, and she charges the lead wolf. It likely weighs fifty pounds more than she does, could crunch her thigh like the bone of a chicken, but she rushes the creature with frightening speed; Cullen only barely bites his tongue.

She dodges past the lead wolf as it leaps at her, striking out with her blade and scoring a deep, ragged wound in the beast's side. It stumbles with a sharp yelp and wolf blood scatters like rubies across the white snow. The Herald sprints a little ways away, beyond the pack's circle, before turning to face them again.

She says something in Elvhen, loud and sneering; it's nothing like the war cries Cullen had learned to employ. It's biting, snarky - trash talk, likely. He wishes he knew what she was saying.

The wolves turn toward her, one by one; to Cullen's chagrin the big one gains its feet and turns back on her immediately, snarling and barking at her even as its blood splashes to the earth.

And she laughs. She takes a quick, threatening step toward the pack. A smaller wolf flinches, but the pack leader goes for her again, not leaping this time but sprinting, and she darts hard to the left. The wolf turns course with her; another rushes her from the side.

Cullen wants to shout at her, wants to warn her, but before he can organize the words in his fuzzy mind he sees the Herald leap upward. She hooks her unmarked hand over the lowest limb of a tree, snatching her legs up out of the wolves' way and hooking one over the tree limb. She rises to a standing position, and Cullen wonders if all Dalish elves are so graceful, so acrobatic, or if she is in some class of her own.

The limb is low, almost too low; wolf jaws snap at her heels as they leap for her, desperate to tear her, rip her, devour her. She digs a hand in one of her pouches and comes up with a pair of thin blades, too small for daggers -

She moves so quickly that Cullen doesn't see it. The nearest wolf to him drops and begins to twitch, a narrow knife protruding from its eyeball; three more go down the same way before he has a chance to form a complete thought, and Cullen realizes that they are down to nine wolves.

He also realizes that standing, let alone standing still, is becoming a chore. Had it been _only_ withdrawal, or _only_ the blood loss, or _only_ the cold, perhaps he could have fought through it, but…

It had been the worst night of withdrawal yet, but he'd had no way of knowing that his decision to take a long, lonely walk around the edges of Haven would end up like this. He had not been clear headed to begin with; he'd taken only his sword and shield, leaving most of his armor behind in the field tent, and he hadn't seen or heard the wolf pack until it was too late. They'd had him surrounded too quickly, and the green glint of their eyes had looked too much like the glow of the Breach - he was almost positive that they were being influenced by some lesser demon, but before he could convince himself to attempt a purge, the creatures had begun darting in on him, snapping and snarling. He'd killed two with his sword, deflected most all of them with his shield, but one unguarded moment was all it had taken for the largest wolf to surprise him, leaping in and sinking its long teeth into his shoulder from behind. His shield shoulder, at that.

It was then that the Herald had appeared, snarling in Elvhen almost as viciously as the wolves, sinking her dagger deep into the haunch of the wolf attacking him. It had let him go and retreated, surprised and bleeding. Cullen isn't certain how - by then he had been preoccupied with the blood pouring from his wound - but the Herald had managed to distract the pack. She'd urged him to move with her, quietly, slowly, and he had followed, but after a few yards she had stopped to wind her scarf around his wounded shoulder.

They'd made it only a few more yards after that. The wolves - whether demonically guided or simply following the scent of Cullen's blood - surrounded them again, and now Cullen is dizzy, nauseated, close to reeling. He is bleeding too quickly, as if his blood isn't thick enough to clot, and he had already been fighting a blinding headache and an unruly stomach prior to being bitten.

He falls. He catches himself on one knee, fighting through the dizziness, refusing to pass out until he can be sure of her safety, at the very least, but his movement has attracted attention, and that's exactly what the Herald hadn't wanted. He knows that, but he can't help it, can't keep his feet when he's shaking from withdrawal and cold and blood loss, and a smaller wolf darts in and tries to snap at him.

Cullen knocks it away, slamming the heel of his hand down on the creature's snout. It yelps and retreats, and he grabs his sword from the snow even though it means taking pressure off his bleeding shoulder; when the wolf darts back in he catches it in the head with a clumsy blow, but it's enough of a wound to incapacitate, at least eventually. The wolf's eye bursts under the edge of his blade, running down its fur, clumped with blood until it looks like jam smeared down its face, and while the creature is preoccupied with howling and pawing at the injury Cullen runs it through.

They're at eight now, he thinks, but his vision is getting swimmy, his head is pounding, and the snow beneath him is an alarming shade of red; he can't be sure how much is his blood and how much belongs to the wolf he killed, but there is a lot of it, steaming stinking red -

He sinks into deep red darkness.

* * *

 He comes to what seems like a century later, with raw pain screaming in his shoulder and fire bubbling in his throat. He smells smoke and panics for a moment, sitting up so quickly that the movement makes him nauseated; he rolls onto his knees and nearly vomits, but nothing comes out of his mouth but a pained retching sound.

After a moment he tries to stand, but two hands grab him by his good shoulder and keep him on his knees.

"Oh no you don't, shem," a voice says, forcing him back down onto makeshift bedroll. "I'm not stitching your shoulder up again, do you hear me? Lay there and be still."

"Lady Herald?" Cullen blinks through the smoke and his own confusion, pushing her hands away as he tries to see her face. "You're alive!"

"I'm not your lady or your Herald. And yes, so you've said," she replies, and she sounds weary, perhaps even a little worried. "Are you coherent this time, shem, or are you going to start raving again?"

"I've..." Cullen swallows hard. "I've been raving, then?"

"Don't worry," she says, "I ignored you. Well, except both times you threw up and the time you broke your stitches, but otherwise yes, I ignored your raving."

"You stitched me up?" He asks, trying not to think about himself babbling nonsense and throwing up like a toddler in front of the Herald.

"Quite badly," she says, in that curiously flat voice of hers. She is stirring something in a pot settled over the coals. "I'm a hunter, not a healer. But that wound needed closing, and I closed it. Twice. Do you feel well enough to eat? You lost an alarming amount of blood. More when I had to drag you to this little cave."

Cullen looks at the Herald - all five feet of her - then looks down at himself. He's nearly six foot five, and for the most part he has the muscle to fill it out. He's lost a bit since the withdrawal set in in earnest, that's true, but -

"Don't look too surprised," she says, still stirring the pot. "We're not far away, and I rolled you onto your shield. It helped some, though I have ruined your belt."

Cullen looks where she nods. His belt is looped over the inside grip of his shield; the inside of his shield is also coated in dried blood.

"How long have we been here?" Cullen asks, and the Herald shrugs.

"A day? A day and a half? The snowstorm began shortly after I killed the alpha wolf. The other wolves scattered as soon as it was dead. I think some demon we missed may have been influencing them, that kind of aggressive alpha behavior is not typical of wolves, but I didn't feel like demon hunting in a blizzard with a half dead Templar."

Cullen opens his mouth to say that he is no longer a Templar, but she continues talking, never so much as glancing his way.

"I managed to shove you onto your shield, and used your belt to pull you along. Luckily I didn't have to drag you far before I spotted this cave. If I had tried to drag you back to Haven, we'd both be dead of exposure. You're rather big even for a shem, you know."

She pauses briefly, peering into the pot, and Cullen wonders whether he should be offended.

The Herald wrinkles her nose and resumes stirring. "The snow turned into a blizzard within the hour. I made a fire, boiled elfroot with a needle and thread, sewed you up and threw my coat over you. You were out for quite awhile. I fell asleep and woke up to your raving. Before I could even try to calm you down you threw up again and passed back out. I cleaned up and went back to sleep. You did it again, only you tore your stitches. I waited for you to pass out, cleaned up, and sewed you up again. After that you were quiet long enough for me to go retrieve a wolf carcass."

"Why would you -"

"I was hungry, and boiled wolf meat is better than nothing," she says. "I had some vegetables in my pack, and some other herbs. It's a tolerable stew. Gamy, but tolerable. You need to eat."

"I'm a little afraid I may be sick again," Cullen admits, eyeing the stew with skepticism.

"Then you'll be sick," the Herald says, in that same deadpan tone of voice that always seems to brook no argument. She dips a tin mug in the stew and hands it to him; for herself, she sharpens a stick with her daggers and skewers bits out of the pot, seeming content to ignore him.

Cullen waits a bit for the questionable stew to cool, then takes a tentative sip of the broth. He is surprised to find that it tastes...fairly good, actually. He takes another sip, getting a bite of wolf meat and some vegetables this time. The meat is definitely gamy, but not so much that it is inedible.

Cullen finishes the cup. When he looks up he realizes that she is staring at him, her bright green eyes unreadable.

"That'll do," she mutters, then stands up abruptly, moving toward the mouth of the cave with both the cup and her dagger in hand.

She returns with a cup full of snow and a hand full of rather frosty wolf haunch. Cullen elects to close his eyes as she begins to carve hunks off the haunch, dropping them into the pot one by one, then dumping in the cup of snow.

"No idea how long this storm will last," she says, "But we should be fine."

"How did you make a fire?" he asks. "There's nothing but snow and wet."

"I keep flint and steel and tinder in my pack, plus a little kindling," she says. "I cut some branches. They should dry enough to burn, I think. If nothing else I have that book on the Inquisition in my pack too. I am not above burning those pages."

"Cassandra would be horrified," Cullen mutters, meaning it as a bit of a jest, but the Herald only shrugs.

"She would be more horrified if her only means of closing the breach died of exposure alongside her pet Templar," she says, and her voice is colder than the blizzard.

Cullen sighs. "I don't suppose it would do much good to remind you that I am no longer a Templar. Nor, for that matter, am I anyone's pet."

"Yet the Templars trained you - raised you, practically, from what I've heard. And the Templars are little more than lap dogs," she says flatly. "Trained to bite where your Chantry points."

"The Chantry is pointing at you, Lady Herald," Cullen answers quietly. "And I've kept my teeth to myself."

He thinks she may be taken aback - her eyes widen ever so slightly, and she is silent for a beat or two longer than usual.

"I will stop calling you Templar when you stop calling me Lady Herald," she says at length, her lip curling as if the words Lady Herald taste bad in her mouth.

"Fair enough, but what should I call you instead?" Cullen asks. "I can't call you only your name -"

"Dread Wolf take you, why not?" she sighs, and the irritation in her voice is the most inflection she has had since Cullen met her. "It's my name. That's what it's for."

Cullen blinks at her, a little startled, searching for a reason why he shouldn't do as she asks.

"It...wouldn't be proper, I suppose," he says at length. "It would be too familiar."

"Too familiar?" she wrinkles her broken nose, tilting her head at him. "Even if you only call me Lavellan?"

"I...think so, yes," he answers, realizing that he is somewhat out of his depth. "It still feels improper, somehow."

"Shems," she mutters. "How would you address me, then, had I not been spit out of the Beyond with magic in my hand? Or if I were a shem like you?"

"Lady Lavellan, most likely," Cullen answers. "Though I don't see why you being human or Elvhen makes any difference."

She cocks an eyebrow at him, and Cullen wonders if he has somehow spoken badly. He admittedly knows next to nothing of the Dalish.

"Is there an...Elvhen title of some sort that you would prefer?" he asks tentatively.

She blinks at him for a moment, as if his question surprises her...and then she laughs.

Cullen has never heard her laugh before, at least not like this. It is a clear, sweet sound, so at odds with her usual temperament that startles him a little.

"No, no," she answers a moment later, still smirking a little. "The Dalish have very few titles, and the ones we do have would not apply to me."

She reaches over to stir the pot again.

"I'd prefer for you to call me Aislin," she sighs. "But if your shem manners prohibit it, then I suppose I must be content with being Lady Lavellan. Refer to me as the Herald with your troops if you must, but not when talking to me. I'm not Andrastian. It isn't right for me to be her Herald."

"As you wish, my lady," Cullen answers. "So long as you no longer call me Templar."

"As you wish, ser," she responds.

Cullen knows that she is mocking him, but he can't find it in him to be annoyed with her. She looks different, now, somehow, as if the laughter had lifted some strange shadow from her face.

They speak little after that. He lets her sleep, feeling well enough to keep watch, and by the time she wakes the blizzard has blown itself out and they are able to hear shouting voices of a search party. The Hera... _Aislin_ leads Adan, Cassandra, Sera, and Solas back to the cave.

"These stitches are terrible," Adan grumbles, looking at Cullen's shoulder. "But serviceable, apparently. I won't redo them, but I should dress this a little better. Follow me, Commander, I assume there's nothing wrong with your legs."

"Be glad you didn't have to drag him," Aislin says; her voice is as inflectionless as ever, but a small smirk plays upon her lips as she watches him blush.

"Can we go back too?" Sera asks, stamping her feet and hugging herself. "Blizzard may be over, but it's still cold as a witch's tit out here, innit?"

"Afraid not," Aislin says. "We're going demon hunting. The wolves that got the Commander weren't normal."

"What do you mean, da'len?" Solas asks. "Are you sure it wasn't the water-sickness?"

"I've killed water-sick wolves before," she replies, sheathing her daggers along her back. "These were nothing like that."

"Best we take care of them sooner rather than later," Cassandra sighs. "They will be difficult to track after the storm, but if they are as aggressive as you say, perhaps they will come to us."

Cassandra, Sera, and Solas file out of the mouth of the cave. Aislin follows, then pauses for a moment, turning back to look at Cullen.

He expects her to speak, perhaps to say farewell, but she only stares at him, scrutinizing him as if he is a particularly difficult puzzle of some sort...and then, abruptly, she turns and leaves without so much as a wave.


End file.
